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Will creating sub folders for foreign versions of the website, remove rank juice from the main site?

We plan to create sub-folders for our german, spanish and italian language versions. If we do will this pass rank juice to the new sites, but at the same time badly effect our main site, regards link juice/serp?

6 Responses

Hope you are planing to target users for different languages or countries. You can achieve this by adding rel="alternate" hreflang="x" annotations in sitemap

Using rel="alternate" hreflang="x"

Using rel="alternate" hreflang="x" anotations in sitemap to tell Google that there is different versions of same website exist on the web. Otherwise Google will consider it as duplicate content and block it from SERP

Example Steps

- For your German version of your website create a sub-folder like www.example.com/de/

- Now you need to create a XML sitemap for this and you can name it as languages.xml

- Upload the sitemap and tell Google where it is located through Google Web Master Tools

That was very helpful, thanks a lot, i did not realise there was a sitemap annotation available, so I just need to add the code indicating each different version + href lang to each language pages' site map?

As far as I'm aware James, using sub-folders will mean that authority is passed to your domain as a whole but you will still need to build authority separately for each of your subfolders for them to rank in each country SERPs that you have targeted in webmaster tools and using the hreflang tag.

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